Events 2009 to 2019

The workshop is co-organized by the Centre for Law, Economics and Society at UCL Laws, the FGV Law School in Sao Paolo and the HSE/Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development. It will take the form of an interactive discussion, after a couple of introductions to each specific topic.

The development of General Purpose Technologies, such as the steam engine, railways, electricity, computing, the Internet, Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, usually leads to disruptive innovation and ultimately to important increases in productivity that provokes important spill-over effects to various industries and markets (Jovanovic & Rousseau, 2005). The term has been employed extensively recently in order to analyse the role of technology in economic growth. Bresnahan and Trajtenberg (1996) argue that GPTs should have the following characteristics:

“Pervasiveness”, as the idea is that the GPT should spread to most sectors of the economy;
“Improvement”, as the GPT becomes better over time, the costs of using it being reduced;
“Innovation spawning”, as the GPT should make it easier to invent and produce new products or processes.

The process of diffusion of a GPT may take a considerable period of time and may lead to entrenched positions for “lead firms” that have early invested on the exploitation of that technology. These firms control GPT clusters, the technology being applied in various economic sectors that will eventually form part of their value nets or value chains. The interactions between the “dominant” or “lead” firms and their application sectors are quite complex. Early technical choices made at the time of the adoption of GPT may create path dependencies and constrain choices at a later process when the GPT has spread and is implemented in various sectors of economic activity. This may lead to “growth bottlenecks” that are exploited by “dominant” or “lead” firms. However, the application sectors may also be a source of competitive constraint to these “dominant” or “lead” firms. Their position is not challenged by new technologies in direct competition with the lead firm’s one but by firms attempting to meet unserved demand outside the original GPT cluster (Bresnahan & Yin, 2016).

This “vertical” competition (Lianos, 2017) may take different forms and does not only correspond to competition within a relevant product market or, even more broadly, an industry, with the aim to lower costs per unit of output so as to gain more market share and in principle raise the rate of return of the capital invested. One may distinguish between competition within an industry, which compels individual producers to lower costs so that they can compete effectively, thus leading to a turbulent equalization of selling prices while profit margin and profit rates are dis-equalized, some firms being more efficient than others, and competition between industries (hardware v. sofware for instance), capital moving from one industry to another in search of higher profits.

Notwithstanding the fact that economic growth constitutes an important aim of competition law enforcement, in view of the increasing emphasis put on the necessary linkage between competition law and innovation, GPTs have not yet been systematically studied from the perspective of competition law. The development of GPTs may lead to important economic and social disruptions and significant periods of dominance of specific “lead” firms. These firms may use their power strategically so as to exclude potential horizontal and/or vertical competition and ensure that their central position remains uncontested. These GPTs also often emerge in developed countries and their diffusion to developing countries may be considerably slowed down or even stopped by “growth bottlenecks”. This has of course a considerable impact on social welfare and global social justice.

The aim of this conference will be to reflect on the way competition law applied to a number of GPTs in the past and understand how this past experience may be useful in assessing the challenges raised by current and future GPTs. The first panel of the conference will engage with the broader issue of GPTs, their impact on economic growth and will then focus, in view of the recent history of antitrust, in particular on the computer industry and Internet (including Internet of Things), but also some old history from which we can draw lessons from (e.g. internal combustion engine, electricity, railroad, automobiles). Part 2 will engage with artificial intelligence/machine learning, Big Data and blockchain and Part 3 will focus on lessons from the biotech industry and DNA design/editing technologies.

Speakers include:

Eduardo Caminati - President of Ibrac
Leonor Cordovil, Grinberg, Cordovil Advogados
Dennis Davis, Competition Appeal Court, South Africa
Professor Marcio de Oliveira Júnior, Brazilian Senate
Elizabeth Farina, President and CEO of the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA).
Eleanor Fox, NYU Law School
Paulo Furquium, ISNPER
Professor Alexey Ivanov, HSE Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development
Professor Ioannis Lianos, UCL
Professor Caio Mario da Silva Pereira Neto, FGV Law School

Transformations of Competition Law

Co-organized by the Centre for Law, Economics and Society at UCL and the Global Competition Law Centre at the College of Europe, Bruges
20 October 2017, London

The conference is convened by:

Professor Ioannis Lianos, UCL
Dr. Damien Gerard, European Commission & Université Catholique de Louvain.

The conference will explore the "liminal conditions of modern competition law" (Lianos, 2017), in particular the various transformations that are taking place globally and may affect the direction of the competition law enterprise. Four transformations emerge as being particularly challenging for mainstream competition law doctrine. The conference will therefore be divided into four panels dealing with each of these areas:

The political dimension of competition law: protectionism and populism, free trader and globalism
The financialisation challenge: common and joint ownership
Technological transformations and the emergence of a new competition law
"Social" and "Green" capitalism: towards a social and green antitrust?

Confirmed speakers include:

Dennis Davis (Competition Appeal Court of South Africa)
Carles Esteva-Mosso (European Commission)
Amelia Fletcher (University of East Anglia)
Michal Gal (University of Haifa)
Damien Geradin (Universite catholique de Louvain)
Damien Gerard (European Commission & Université Catholique de Louvain)
Herbert Hovenkamp (University of Pennsylvania)
Dimitry Katalevsky (Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology)
Suzanne Kingston (University College Dublin)
Ioannis Kokkoris (Queen Mary University of London)
Assimakis Komninos (White & Case)
Ioannis Lianos (UCL)
Bjorn Lundqvist (Stockholm University)
Barry Lynn (New America)
Julian Nowag (Lund University)
Oke Odudu (University of Cambridge)
Sir Peter Roth (Competition Appeal Tribunal)
Maarten Pieter Schinkel (University of Amsterdam)
Maurice Stucke (UT College of Law)
Mike Walker (Competition and Markets Authority)
Tim Wu (Columbia Law School)

UCL CLP: Polycentric Competition Law

Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2017-18
19 October 2017, London

Speaker: Professor Ioannis Lianos (UCL Laws)
Chair: The Honourable Judge Dennis Davis (Judge of the High Court of South Africa and Judge President of the Competition Appeal Court of South Africa)

About this lecture:

In a world marked by financial instability, limited growth, rising inequality, deteriorating ecology, growing corporate consolidation, and political turmoil, a number of calls are made to shift the dominant competition law paradigm towards new directions. These may bring competition law beyond its usual comfort zone of assessing business, or government, practices from the point of view of their effect on prices, output and, more broadly, consumer welfare. Competition law is seen as a tool to be used in various circumstances in order to “correct” market, but also non-market (e.g. government) failures, that result from restrictions of competition, to the extent that these affect social welfare.

These failures may relate to the protection of personal data and privacy, the protection of the environment, the promotion of social mobility, the harnessing of disruptive innovation, or the mitigation of technology risks. Some go even further and argue that competition law may well be employed in order to preserve a number of other “values” of social justice, thought to be intrinsic in democratic capitalism and the liberal order, and to which competition law should be sensitive. These calls for an extension of the competition law field have been met with fierce resistance, some contending that the methods, the tools, the procedures and the main sources of wisdom of competition law are ill-suited for such an expansive role, and that other kinds of social rules and institutional arrangements may be better suited for taking into account these concerns. The lecture will assess these competing claims and their underlying presuppositions with the aim to unveil and portray the rites of passage in this transition, and to explore the liminal condition of modern competition law.

About the speaker:

Ioannis Lianos holds the chair of global competition law and policy at UCL Laws. He is also Director of the Centre for Law, Economics and Society and Executive Director of the Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics

He joined UCL in September 2005. He was awarded a Gutenberg Research chair at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the elite public administration school of the French republic in November 2011.

He is also a visiting professor at the Centre for International Industrial Property Studies (CEIPI) of the University of Strasbourg, since 2004, the Faculty of Law of the University of Chile in Santiago, since December 2011, a fellow at the Centre for Law and Economics at the Australian National University (ANU), since 2011, a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong School of Law in March 2014. He was an Emile Noel Fellow at the Jean Monnet Centre at New York University School of Law in 2008-2009.

Artificial Cosmoi and the Law: Legal Theory and practice in the Era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and robots

A conference organised by the Centre for Law, Economics & Society (CLES), IMEDIPA and the European Public Law Organisation (EPLO)
27 July 2017, Athens
Convened by Professor Ioannis Lianos, Director, Centre for Law, Economics and Society, UCL
with Dr. George Dimitropoulos, HBKU Law
With the kind sponsorship of Ballas Pelecanos & Associates L.P.C.

This conference fostered lively debate between scholars from various disciplines and practitioners on the interaction between Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, robots, virtual reality and algorithmic decision-making – the ‘artificial cosmoi’, and the legal system.

The recently published ‘One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence’ identifies a number of areas of human activity that are and will likely be affected by AI in the near future.[1] But the law is conspicuously slow in adapting to the needs of society and in particular to the development of new technologies. Law usually reacts to societal changes, but it, moreover, usually has a restricting function: it prohibits rather than enables certain types of activities. Both features of law make it a rather poor instrument to deal with the cataclysmic changes that the rapid developments in the technologies of Artificial Intelligence will be bringing about in the not too distant future. These will touch upon all aspects of social life, from issues of employment and intellectual creation, or more generally the creation of resources, to new modes of data and AI-driven governance, and will affect multiple environments reaching from the streets and hospitals to the battlefield. If it is for the law to remain relevant, it will have to rapidly adapt to these challenges so as not to move from the epicenter to the periphery of social activity. A possible, mostly reactive, approach will be to design legal rules mitigating the risks arising from the recourse to Artificial Intelligence and the development of artificial cosmoi, but also to take advantage of algorithms and AI in achieving the objectives of the law. The Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament recently proposed the establishment of a European Agency for robotics and artificial intelligence in order to supply public authorities with technical, ethical and regulatory expertise, and the setting of common European Union rules to be adopted on a voluntary basis to regulate issues of liability for the social, environmental and human health impacts of robotics in order to ensure that they operate in accordance with legal, safety and ethical standards – eventually by also considering the creation of a specific legal status for robots as ‘electronic persons’;[2] this illustrates the increasing interest of legislators and regulators in the various societal, legal and ethical risks raised by AI and associated technologies. However, beyond this reactive approach, how should legal epistemology be re-conceived so as to fully engage with the ‘structuration’ of the emerging ‘artificial cosmoi’?

[1] Peter Stone et al.. ‘Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030’. One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: Report of the 2015-2016 Study Panel, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, September 2016, available at: http://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report.

[2] Study available at: European Parliament website

Blockchain and the Constitution of a New Financial Order: Legal and Political Challenges

Organised by the UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society with the support of the Modern Law Review and UCL Public Engagement
19 June 2017

The workshop dealt with emergent economic, political and legal phenomena in the field of FinTech. It pursued two distinct goals. First, it intended to generate awareness and facilitate a better understanding of the actors, phenomena and dynamics of the new financial order. Second, it explored the political and legal implications of financial and technological innovation based on blockchain technology. These debates will constitute the basis of an edited volume that introduces practitioners and researchers to the regulatory and political challenges of blockchain technologies and its diverse uses.

The Speakers included:

Tomaso Aste (UCL)
Iris Chiu (UCL)
Georgios Dimitropoulos (Hamad Bin Khalifa University Law School)
Stefan Eich (Princeton Society of Fellows)
Hermann Elendner (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Jonathan Greenacre (Oxford University)
Rohan Grey (Modern Money Network)
Philipp Hacker (EUI)
Michael Jacobides (London Business School and NY Fed)
Rosa María Lastra (Queen Mary University of London)
Ioannis Lianos (UCL)
Pietro Ortolani (Max Planck Institute Luxembourg)
Giovanni Sartor (European University Institute)
Alexandros Seretakis (University of Luxembourg)
Paolo Tasca (UCL)
Angela Walch (St. Mary’s University School of Law)
Aaron J. Wright (Cardozo School of Law)
Karen Yeung (King’s College London)
Claus D. Zimmermann (Sidley Austin LLP)

Learning Outcomes:
This event introduced legal practitioners and researchers to the regulatory and political challenges of blockchain technologies and its diverse uses.

Competition Law in China: An Introduction

A one-day CPD course introducing Chinese Competition Law
taught by
Dr Thomas Cheng (The University of Hong Kong)
Dr David Stallibrass (Fingleton Associates)
6 June 2017

About the course:
This six-hour short course gave an introduction to the Chinese Competition Law and covered all the basic aspects of substantive competition law in China, including:

restrictive agreements,
abuse of dominance,
merger review,
IP-competition interface, and
an area of competition law unique to China known as abuse of administrative monopoly.

The course introduced the leading cases with reference to both private litigation in the courts and administrative enforcement by state agencies.

It highlighted the similarities and difference between the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law and competition law in other jurisdictions, such as the EU and the US. In addition, it will set the Chinese law within the broader context of Chinese political and economic development.

The course included a discussion of the unique context in which competition law is enforced in China and a critical evaluation of the cause and effect of divergence between Chinese and international competition law norms.

Course schedule:

09:30 Registration
10:00 Session 1: General Introduction + Restrictive Agreements
11:30 Break
11:45 Session 2: Abuse of Dominance
13:15 Lunch (lunch is provided)
14:15 Session 3: Merger Review
15:45 Break
16:00 Session 4: IP-Competition Interface/Abuse of Administrative Monopoly
17:30 Course ends

Learning outcomes:

You will become familiar with the political economy and institutional environment that contextualises competition law enforcement in China.
You will understand the basic aspects of all areas of substantive competition law, including restrictive agreements, abuse of dominance, merger review, IP-competition interface, and an area of competition law unique to China known as abuse of administrative monopoly.
You will be introduced to leading cases with reference to both private litigation in the courts and administrative enforcement by state agencies.
You will acquire a greater appreciation of the development of competition law in China in the context of the global debate about and movement toward convergence.

Course Prerequisites:
There are no prerequisites for this course, though a good understanding of UK, EU, or US competition law is highly desirable.

Readings:
A pack with english translations of core legislation, guidance, and decisions will be provided.

About the teachers
Thomas Cheng is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale College, and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School, and a Bachelor of Civil Law degree in European and Comparative Law from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on competition law and policy issues, especially comparative competition law and competition law in developing countries. He is a member of the Hong Kong Competition Commission, Administrative Appeals Board, the Energy Advisory Committee, and the Committee on Slots Complaints. He has assisted the Hong Kong government in drafting the city’s first comprehensive competition law. He is also a member of the executive board of the Academic Society for Competition Law (“ASCOLA”) and is a member of the advisory board of the American Antitrust Institute.

David Stallibrass is a director at Fingleton Associates, a strategic regulatory advice boutique. He was the first economist to testify before both a regional high-court and the Supreme Peoples Court of China in an antitrust dispute in the high profile dispute between Tencent and Qihoo 360. Previously he worked in a number of roles at the UK Office of Fair Trading such as Director responsible for consumer protection and competition enforcement in the health and professional services industries; Assistant Director responsible for the OFT’s investigation into bank charges; Senior Economic Advisor on a wide range of investigations and mergers; and Head of Strategy. David has degrees from Oxford Univeristy and the London School of Economics, is a senior research fellow at Koguan Law School in Shanghai, and has published a number of articles on antitrust and regulation. Currently David is a director at Fingleton Associates, a strategic regulatory advice boutique.

Global Antitrust BRICS' style

3rd BRICS Competition Law Forum co-organised by UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society and the HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development as part of the VII St. Petersburg International Legal Forum
18 May to 10 May 2017, St Petersburg

This third edition of the BRICS Competition Law and Policy forum brought together a number of BRICS and non-BRICS competition officials, academics and NGO representatives to discuss important issues relating to the global governance of competition law with the aim to build a concrete BRICS agenda for competition law and policy reform. The workshop formed part of the public engagement of the Director of the CLES@UCL, Professor Ioannis Lianos, following the establishment of a BRICS Joint Research Platform in May 2016, in the context of the second edition of the BRICS competition law forum, which, in addition to its task to improving the quality of decision-making within BRICS’ competition authorities, also aims to serve as an alternative forum in the constitution of a global deliberative space in the area of competition law. For this new vision on the role of BRICS in the global governance of competition law and in the development of a more progressive competition law agenda globally, read Professor Lianos’ recent publication

Economic Evidence in Competition Law and the Future of the “More Economic” Approach

A one-day conference organised by UCL Centre for Law, Economics & Society and University of Groningen Faculty of Law, supported by CRA Charles River Associates, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Compass Lexecon
12 May 2017, Amsterdam

About the event:

This conference focused on a systematic analysis of the role of economic evidence in competition law proceedings. We explored the way in which economic evidence has been used and has been assessed by courts and competition authorities, and how the increased role of economic evidence influences the functioning of institutions (both NCAs as well as national and European courts).

The increasing impact of economics on competition law is well documented. The main tenets and principles of competition law have witnessed a profound transformation following the systematic recourse to economics as an external source of authority. More than in any other field of law, competition law is intrinsically linked with the discipline of economics, as this is shown by the frequent references to economic concepts and the methodology of competition and regulatory authorities, the case law of the courts and the expanding soft law relating to the interpretation of the competition law and regulatory statutes. The increasing importance of private enforcement for competition law violations in national courts raises also important questions of proof and evaluation of damages.

While legal practitioners increasingly cooperate with economists in the preparation and assessment of competition law cases, judges and competition authorities are required to assess and weigh economic and econometric evidence drafted by (forensic) economists. Moreover, competition authorities have developed soft law guidelines discussing “best practices” for the submission and assessment of economic evidence in administrative and judicial proceedings. Hence, all actors in competition law practice are profoundly affected by the increasing and often pivotal role of economics in competition law.

At this conference, the transformative impact of economic analysis both on the law as such – in particular the rules of evidence, standard of proof, and causation – and legal institutions were analysed by speakers who are global leaders in competition law and economics, and come from the Court of Justice and the General Court of the European Union, national courts, national competition authorities, the European Commission, practice, and academia.

Conference themes at a glance:

Economic evidence and the legal standard of proof
The transformation of institutions and procedures for a “more economics” oriented competition law enforcement: successes and failures?
Admissibility and assessment of economic evidence by courts and competition authorities: theory and practice
Causation, evaluation of damages and the passing on of overcharges
The future of the ‘more economic’ approach in competition law enforcement in Europe

Multi-Sided Platforms: Business, Economics & Competition Policy

Organised by the UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society and the UCL Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics
25 April 2017

Speaker: Professor David Evans (UCL / University of Chicago)

About the course:

All of the “sharing-economy” firms, such as Uber, Airbnb, and BlaBlaCar, many of the biggest companies in the world, including Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and many of the firms that lead the online economy are matchmakers. These businesses all operate physical or virtual platforms where they connect members of one group of customers, like people looking for a ride, with another group of companies, like drivers. Economists call them “multi-sided platforms” and have developed a new body of economics that explains how they work and why they are different from traditional firms.

Multi-sided platform businesses are often at the heart of debates concerning competition policy and sectoral regulation including, in the EU, the current on-line sectoral inquiry and the interchange fee controversies. Platforms have been the subject of several significant court judgments around the world including by the European Court of Justice in Cartes Bancaires v. European Commission, the Chinese Supreme Peoples’ Court in Qihoo360 v. Tencent, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. Department of Justice v. American Express et al.

This course covered the unique business models followed by multi-sided businesses; the economics of multi-sided platforms and the industries they anchor; the application of competition policy to multi-sided platforms; a survey of key competition policy and regulatory matters involving these platforms; and tools and techniques for competition policy analysis.

The course included presentations from several executives of multi-sided platforms including incumbents and startups.

The course consisted of three segments:

The Business and Economics of Multi-sided Platforms.
Market Definition, Market Power, and Merger Analysis for Multi-sided Platforms
Abuse of Dominance and Coordinated Practices for Multi-sided Platforms

The course drew extensively on examples of multi-sided platform cases involving digital platforms and payment schemes drawn from the EU, US, China, and other jurisdictions.

Who should attend:
The course was mainly designed for specialists in competition policy and sectoral regulation (lawyers, economists, and officials) but should also be informative for anyone who works for, invests in, must interact with multi-sided platform businesses.

There were no pre-requisites for attending this course. Students were encouraged to purchase David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee, Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016). A suggested reading list was distributed two weeks before the course.

FinTech and the Law

24 April 2017

Teachers/Presenters included:

Simon Deane-Johns, Consultant Solicitor, Keystone Legal
Bob Ferguson, Head of Project Innovate, FCA
Nick Hungerford, Founder and Director of Nutmeg
Robert Kilian, General Counsel, N26 Bank
Prof. Ioannis Lianos, UCL
Dr Despoina Mantzari, University of Reading
Michael McKee, Partner, DLA Piper
John Salmon, Partner, Hogan Lovells LLP
Paul Smith, Head of Regulatory Strategy and Policy, Payment Systems Regulator
Victor Trokoudes, Co-founder & CEO of Plum

About the course:
Less than a decade after the Financial Crisis, innovations in finance have radically reshaped the modern economy. The rapid application of technology, big data and algorithms on banking, lending and investing has led to the emergence of a new industry, the so-called FinTech industry. FinTech companies compete in the marketplace of traditional financial institutions and intermediaries in the delivery of financial services. Furthermore, the rise of peer-to-peer lending platforms and solutions over social networks and email as well as robo-advice challenge the traditional banking model and more generally the financial services industry.

Against the evolving intersection of technology and finance, the course sought to introduce lawyers and the general public to the way the FinTech industry is organised, its various business models and the way leading FinTech companies think of their interaction with the legal system. This course also involved regulators and lawyers who brought their own perspective on these questions. We conceived this course as a meeting point between the industry, regulators and legal practice to reflect on the regulatory future of this highly evolving industry.

We also aimed to take a practical perspective and provide detailed guidance on the various legal issues that fintech start-ups will need to tackle when considering launching their operations. This involves compliance with financial regulation rules, the company performing a detailed analysis of its business model with regard to applicable financial regulation so as to seek appropriate licences or approvals, or designing its business model so as not to become a regulated entity, the protection of its technology and innovations, the management of its customers’ data in compliance with data protection rules, entering into various commercial collaborations and investment opportunities. All these aspects were examined by industry experts and regulators.

The seminar consisted of three segments:

Part I, led by FinTech leaders from London and Berlin provided a mapping of the FinTech industry and the role start-up companies and financial institutions play in this new ecosystem.
Part II, led by leading lawyers in the sector explored the legal issues that have emerged or may emerge in the context of FinTech.
Part III brought together regulators and industry leaders to examine the evolving role of regulators in the regulation of FinTech and in safeguarding and promoting innovation.

Schedule:
15:00 registration
15:20 Panel 1
16:10: break
16.30 Panel 2
17:40 Panel 3
19:00 reception

Who should attend:
The course was mainly designed for specialists and generalists in financial regulation, financial services and banking but should also be informative for anyone who works for, invests in, must interact with the emerging FinTech industry.

There were no pre-requisites for attending this course. Materials were distributed before the course.

Learning Hours
This course comprised of 3 learning hours for Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board training records.

Perspectives on Competition Law & Policy, Competitiveness and Economic Development

22 February 2017

Speaker: R. Shyam Khemani (Former Advisor, Competition Policy & Business Environment The World Bank Group, Washington DC, USA)

About the event:

In 1992, there were approximately 35 countries/jurisdictions with specific competition (antitrust) laws. By 2008, there were about 110, and currently about 140 that have competition legislation in place. What were the driving forces behind the growth in competition laws? Was there an increasing recognition of the merits of promoting and protecting competition? If so why did it take so long given that Canada and the US enacted competition law in 1889 and 1890 respectively? Was competition law part of the World Bank/IMF policy or loan conditionality? What has been the general experience in the implementation of these laws? Has it led to greater competition, competitiveness, investment, and growth? What are the impediments? And what lessons can be drawn?

The presentation is based on the policy research and experience spanning nearly two decades as the principal advisor on competition policy in the World Bank Group.

About the speaker: Dr. R. SHYAM KHEMANI,PhD (LSE) Special Advisor, Competition Policy, SKP Group

Dr. Khemani has extensive experience in both the private and public sectors. In addition to holding several senior positions at the World Bank Group, Washington DC, between 1992-2008, he was Advisor, Competition Policy and Business Environment, in the Financial & Private Sector Development Vice-Presidency working on competion, competitiveness and investment issues. During 2008-2014, he was Principal Economist at Microeconomics Consulting and Research Associates (MiCRA), Washington DC, dealing with complex economic litigation matters. Between 2000-2002 he resided in Paris, France, where he served as Director, Law & Economics Consulting Group (LECG) European operations and was involved in policy and case specific issues in different jurisdictions, including the European Union. Previously he worked with the Canadian Competition Bureau where he was the first Chief Economist and Director of Economics & International Affairs, and earlier, Adviser on merger policy. In these capacities he team-led the analysis of complex merger cases and other competition issues across a wide spectrum of industries and markets, and contributed to the barriers to entry and economic efficiency sections of the merger guidelines. He also contributed to the work of two Royal Commissions in Canada dealing with issues of industrial concentration, competition policy, competitiveness and economic growth, and has appeared as an expert before parliamentary committees and regulatory institutions.

He also served as an Advisor to the Chairman, Raghavan committee in regards to designing India’s new competition law and policy. In these various capacities he has advised governments and business in over two dozen industrial and developing countries on various competition, regulation, micro-industrial economics, and international trade issues.

Until 2016, Dr. Khemani was a member of the Advisory Board of the Bloomberg-Bureau of National Affair’s Antitrust and Trade Regulation Report. He continues to serve as advisor at the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) and CUTS-an NGO based in India, among others. He was co-Director in establishing the International Bar Association’s Global Forum on Competition, and has served on various working groups of the American Bar Association, the International Chambers of Commerce, and the International Competition Network. He has also served on the Faculty of Business Administration and Commerce at the University of British Columbia, and several other Canadian universities where he taught courses on competitive strategy, industrial organization-competition policy, and microeconomics. He has published monographs, articles in various journals (e.g., Journal of Industrial Economics, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Antitrust Bulletin, Applied Economics, Policy Options, etc.), and co-edited books on competition policy. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE), U.K., an M.A. from McGill University, Montreal, Canada and BA (Honours) in Economics & Political Science from Fergusson College, Pune, India.

Competition Law in South Africa: The Past and the Future

2 February 2017

Lecture by
Mr Tembinkosi Bonakele
Commissioner, Competition Commission of South Africa

Commentators

Dennis Davies, President of the Competition Appeal Court, South Africa (tbc)
Simon Roberts, Professor at the University of Johannesburg

Please click here to download the slides from this lecture: Bonakele Lecture Slides

Global Value Chains in Competition Law

1 February 2017

About the conference:

“The paradigm of the world political economy has shifted dramatically over the past twenty years. Legal scholarship, however, lags significantly behind. Existing legal scholarship is calibrated to an outdated model that suggests that multinational corporations – either individually or through one-to-one supplier relationships — create, manufacture, and sell a given product. But in today’s world, in what have been termed ‘global value chains’ the research, design, production, and retail of most products take place through coordinated chain components that stretch systemically across multiple – from a few to a few thousand – firms […] (t)he most important paradigm for understanding the global economy, and the political and social relationships that both guide it and stem from it, is no longer the template of the market but rather the role of global value chains” (K.B. SOBEL-READ, (2014), Global value Chains: A Framework for Analysis, Transnational Legal Theory, 5(3), pp. 364-407, 364 & 367)

Global Value Chains are prevalent in the global economy. A recent joint OECD, WTO and World bank report indicates that between 30% and 60% of G20 countries’ exports consist of intermediate inputs traded within GVCs. Economic production is increasingly structured around GVCs, which permit the simultaneous and coordinated transnational production and distribution of a very large array of products that each stage of the supply chain has to manage effectively, without this involving vertical integration by ownership. These supply chains start from the factors of production and other inputs needed for the production of a good and end up with distribution of the end product to the final consumer. Firms find it crucial to enter into long-term agreements with partners in other segments of a value chain, in order to create the necessary relation of trust that is required by the importance of relation specific investments that need to be undertaken in setting the supply chain management. This may lead to disintermediation and vertical integration but also to de-concentration through the constitution of networks or supply alliances that are managed by supply chain councils.

With some exceptions GVCs have not been explored systematically by competition law. The concept offers an important analytical potential. The most obvious one relates to the transnational dimension it brings forward, calling for a “transnational coordination” between “destination states” and “producer states”, this coordination being pursued at global, regional or bilateral levels, and raising interesting questions as to the scope of the extraterritorial enforcement of competition law, in particular with regard to “transformed products”. A deeper impact could be the re-conceptualization of the way competition law deals with vertical integration or quasi-integration and the more holistic perspective the concept of global value chain may ask from competition law enforcement, also with regard to its interaction with other competition policies.

Scope of the Conference
The conference explored these different dimensions of the global value chain concept in competition law. The first part focused on the delimitation of this concept and discussed its usefulness as an operational concept in competition law, looking in particular to its trans-national dimension and the international aspects of competition law enforcement. The second and third parts of the conference took an industry-specific perspective and explored how the concept of global value chain may alter the way we conceptualize the role and tasks of competition law with regard to global digital value chains and global food value chains. Issues, such as the implications of big data, the development of digital platforms, the gatekeeping role of search engines, the quest for network neutrality, the increasing consolidation of the factors of production sector in food, the global strategies of retailers were explored from the angle of Global Value Chains theory with the aim to understand how this may challenge “the familiar landmarks of our thought” in competition law and economics and how we may need to reconsider the current model of competition law enforcement in these areas.

Multi-Sided Platforms: Business, Economics & Competition Policy

UCL Centre for Law, Economics & Society
and the UCL Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics
25 January 2017

Speaker: Professor David Evans (UCL / University of Chicago)

About the course:

Multi-sided platform businesses are often at the heart of debates concerning competition policy and sectoral regulation including, in the EU, the current on-line sectoral inquiry and the interchange fee controversies. Platforms have been the subject of several significant court judgments around the world including by the European Court of Justice in Cartes Bancaires v. European Commission, the Chinese Supreme Peoples’ Court in Qihoo360 v. Tencent, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. Department of Justice v. American Express et al.

The course included presentations from several executives of multi-sided platforms including incumbents and startups.

The course consisted of three segments:

The Business and Economics of Multi-sided Platforms.
Market Definition, Market Power, and Merger Analysis for Multi-sided Platforms
Abuse of Dominance and Coordinated Practices for Multi-sided Platforms

The course drew extensively on examples of multi-sided platform cases involving digital platforms and payment schemes drawn from the EU, US, China, and other jurisdictions.

2016

Hot Topics at the Crossroads between Antitrust and IP in the Pharma Sector

UCL Centre for Law, Economics & Society; King’s College London, and the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato
21 October 2016

About the conference:
The event was held at the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) and attracted more than a hundred practitioners and academics. It was introduced by the President of the CAT, Sir Peter Roth.

Digital Currencies, Digital Finance and the Constitution of a New Financial Order: Challenges for the Legal System

This was the first event of the recently launched research initiative of the CLES@UCL on Digital Currencies, Digital Finance and the Constitution of a New Financial Order.
27 June 2016, Athens

About this conference:
The conference dealt with emergent economic, political and legal phenomena in the field of finance. Therefore, it aimed to raise questions and explore innovative connections rather than to give definite answers. It pursued four distinct goals. First, it intended to generate awareness and facilitate a better understanding of the actors, phenomena and dynamics of the new financial order. Second, it explored the economic, political and legal implications that follow from a data-driven financial world. The concept of the performativity of markets offers a great vantage point that can bring together a range of discussions spanning from the legal and political implications of technological change in financial intermediation to even larger questions of monetary governance. Third, it was hoped that these debates would ideally constitute the basis of an edited volume that brings the proceedings of the conference to the attention of a greater public. Fourth, the conference aimed to bring together internationally-renowned experts from different fields and disciplines so as to facilitate a discourse that breaks up traditional patterns of intellectual exchange. This is primarily reflected in the composition of the panels.

Competition Law and IP: A Chinese and Comparative Perspective

UCL Centre for Law, Economics & Society in collaboration with:

Center for Competition Law and Policy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development

9 July 2016, Shanghai, China

About this international conference: Download the conference programme

The Android case(s): A Discussion

Part of the UCL Centre for Law, Economics & Society Brown Bag Lunch Series
22 June 2016

Panelists:

Prof. Herbert Hovenkamp (University of Iowa Law School)
Ass. Prof. Alexey Ivanov (HSE Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development)
Dr. Pierre Regibeau (CRA & Imperial College London)
Prof. Ioannis Lianos (UCL Faculty of Laws & Director, CLES)

About this event:

Alphabet’s Google’s contractual (and other) practices with regard to Android, an off-the-shelf Operating system (OS) that Original Equipment Manufacturers can freely install on a cell phone or other computing devices, have been at the centre of the enforcement attention of various competition authorities around the world. In 2012, the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China (Mofcom) announced its conditional approval of the Google/Motorola merger, some of the conditions raised concerning the licensing of the Android Operating System to hardware manufacturers. In 2013, the South Korean Fair Trade Commission dropped a two-year anti-competition probe into Google’s Android smartphone operations. In 2015, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service adopted a decision finding Google “guilty of abusing its dominant position” and requesting Google to make changes in the requirements it puts on its hardware partners. This decision has been recently confirmed on appeal. In April 2016, the European Commission announced that it sent a statement of objections to Google, in which it takes the preliminary view that the company has, in breach of EU antitrust rules, “abused its dominant position” by imposing restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators. It was reported that the United States Federal Trade Commission is currently investigating into whether Google unfairly used Android’s strength in the mobile computing market to prioritize its own services over those of competitors. Google responded to these allegations by publishing a statement emphasizing its “model of open innovation”.

The objective of the discussion was not to address the factual elements of the Android case(s), for which there is little published information, but to reflect on the possible theories that could be advanced by each of the parties and explore the various theories and approaches followed by various competition authorities around the world with regard to a similar set of facts, the link between expertise and politics that underscores the various interventions, and, finally, the broader picture of the global governance of competition law that emerges out of the multiple competition law investigations in these jurisdictions.

Competition Law and Inequality Roundtable

21 June 2016

Chair
Prof. Ioannis Lianos, UCL Faculty of Laws; Director, CLES

Speakers:

Commissioner Tembinkosi Bonakele (South African Competition Commission)
Prof. Damien Geradin (Tilburg University, George Mason University and UCL Faculty of Laws)
Prof. Herbert Hovenkamp (University of Iowa Law School & UCL Faculty of Laws)
Prof. Morten Hviid (University of East Anglia)
Prof. Bill Kovacic (King’s College London, Dickson Poon School of Law & George Washington University)
Prof. Bruce Lyons (University of East Anglia)
Sean Ennis and Pedro Gonzaga (OECD)
Ms. Azza Raslan (World Bank & UCL Faculty of Laws)
Prof. Tommaso Valletti (Imperial College London)

About this event:

In his recent book on Inequality: What can be done? Professor Tony Atkinson makes the following proposal:

“Proposal 2: Public policy should aim at a proper balance of power among stakeholders, and to this end should a) introduce an explicitly distributional dimension into competition policy; […]”

This proposal raises a number of questions with regard to the way competition law may square with inequality concerns.

First, is the distributional dimension already taken into account in competition law? And if yes, is a “proper” balance of power among stakeholders achieved? Who should define this “proper” balance of power?

Second, are the concepts and instruments of competition law ready for a more pronounced distributional dimension? What would be the concepts and instruments ones needs to develop and the reforms one needs to bring to modern competition law enforcement so as to make it more distributive justice compatible?

Third, how a more proactive distributive justice agenda in competition law may square with the global governance of antitrust and the fact that consumers are mostly found in developed countries (rather than developing ones) and that many of the actions taken by competition authorities may be thought of as focusing only on certain parts of the population with higher than average revenue?

Fourth, is the lack of competition one of the causes of the inequality currently observed in developed countries, such as the Unites States and the European Union?

Fifth, it seems that the growing financialisation of the economy has played some role in exacerbating inequalities. As a CEPR blog report recently noted “(t)he financial sector has seen a moderate increase in its share of the workforce and a dramatic increase in pay per worker (between 1978 and 2000, wages rose 73.7 percent in the financial sector but rose just 12.0 percent in the private sector more generally). These two factors have allowed finance to capture a growing share of wages and made it so most Americans are unable to share in the economy’s gains” (http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/the-growth-of-finance-in-graphs). If this is true, has the lack of an active competition law enforcement with regard to the financial sector for decades played a role? Are the existing competition law tools sufficient, or not, to take into account the growing importance of overlapping financial investor ownership? What can be done to remedy this problem, in case of course this is something one considers to be a priority?

Innovation, Competition Law and IP Rights

21 to 22 June 2016

Tutor:
Professor Herbert Hovenkamp, University of Iowa School of Law and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Visiting Professor, UCL

About the course:

The course explored the interaction between competition law and intellectual property rights. In the modern knowledge economy undertakings develop a number of strategies to expand their IP rights portfolio and achieve competitive advantages by employing their IP rights in order to exclude competitors or raise their costs, and charge higher prices to consumers. Competition law and IP law disputes are interconnected, as recent litigation in the pharmaceutical sector and the recent patent wars in the IT sector illustrate.

The course analyzed the value of competition law in addressing a variety of practices in innovation-intensive markets, including interconnection in networks, duties to deal, the licensing and distribution of IP rights (standard setting organizations, patent pools), tying, patent assertions by non-practising entities, pay-for-delay (“reverse”) settlements, and the nature of FRAND obligations for standards essential patents (SEPs), as well as injunctive remedies and computation of FRAND royalties, drawing from examples mostly from US law.

The course also considered the uses and limitations of competition law and policy as a vehicle for promoting innovation and will examine realistic reforms that can be undertaken in IP law and competition law in order to achieve this objective.The course aimed to examine the interaction between competition law and IP law in various sectors of the economy and the practical implications of that interaction for a number of commercial practices.

The course primarily examined the US systems for competition law and intellectual property rights.

Getting Merger Control Clearances for Corporate Deals

a one-day CPD course
9 June 2016

Course Convenor and Presenters:

Kyriakos Fountoukakos (Herbert Smith Freehills LLP)
Peter Rowland (Herbert Smith Freehills LLP)
Nick Root (Herbert Smith Freehills LLP)

About the course:
Merger control is an essential part of a competition practitioner’s every day work and is also of importance to other advisors (corporate lawyers, bankers) involved in transactions. It needs to be considered in every corporate deal including private acquisitions of whole companies, shares or assets, public takeover bids, minority investments in companies and joint venture agreements. This is because merger control will impact key aspects of a transaction: the transaction time table (“when can I close the deal?”) and even the “deliverability” of a transaction (“can I do the deal?” “Will remedies be imposed?”). More than 100 countries around the world now have merger control laws. Most of them, like the EU regime, are “mandatory” and “suspensory” regimes: a filing must be made and the deal cannot close before clearance has been received from the relevant regulators. Despite the central importance of merger control for competition lawyers, corporate lawyers, investment bankers and businesses, merger control is a topic that is often not taught in detail and from a hands-on perspective in undergraduate or even post-graduate courses.

Competition Policy at the Intersection of Equity and Efficiency

A special conference honouring the scholarship of Eleanor M. Fox (NYU)
8 June 2016, Brussels

About the conference:
This symposium on Competition Law at the Intersection of Equity and Efficiency, co-organized by the Centre for Global Competition Law at the College of Europe and the Centre for Law, Economics and Society aimed to discuss Eleanor Fox’s contribution to the field of competition policy. Leading competition law scholars from around the world commented on Eleanor Fox’s scholarship, reflecting on her legacy, while engaging with the broader debate of the relation between “efficiency” and “equity” in competition law.
The symposium aimed to provide critical insights into the work of one of the world’s most prominent competition law scholar of the past four decades by providing leading global competition law experts, Eleanor’s colleagues and friends, the opportunity to engage with the psyche of competition law and the balance, for some, or Faustian Pact for others, it has reached between “efficiency” and “equity”.

View the programme

The Digital Economy: Economics, Antitrust and Regulation

A three-hour CPD course on the Digital Economy; Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics & UCL Centre for Competition, Law & Society
7 June 2016

Speaker: Professor David Evans (UCL / University of Chicago)
Accreditation: 3 CPD hours

About the course:
The digital economy has grown vast and now reaches almost every aspect of our lives. Whether consumer, business, or regulator we interact with Internet-based businesses constantly. It is also undergoing a massive transformation, with accompanying disruption, as the PC-web-browser centric ecosystem shifts to a mobile-app-centric ecosystem. That transformation has resulted in the “sharing economy,” the “gig-economy”, and the “app-economy” to use some of phrases that dominate today’s conversations.

This course covered the unique business models followed by Internet-based companies; explored the changes in market structure that have taken place in the last few years as a result of the move to mobile; and considered some of the key competition policy and regulatory issues being debated today.

The course consisted of three one-hour segments:

The basic economics and technology of Internet-based businesses. This segment explored the role of multisided platforms and their use of “free” models; advertising-supported models including the role of attention markets; and technological underpinnings of the modern web-based economy.
The move to mobile and its economic and policy implications. This segment focused on the economics and technology behind the rise of mobile including the economics of the app-based ecosystem and how it differs from the web-based ecosystem.
Competition policy for the digital economy. This segment examined key competition policy issues, including ways in which the nature of the mobile-based ecosystem could affect competitive constraints and exclusionary practices, and regulatory issues, particularly related to privacy and asymmetric regulation.

The course drew extensively on examples of competition policy cases involving the digital economy from the US, EU, and China and these were included in each segment.

Competition Law in China

A one-day CPD course introducing Chinese Competiton Law
26 May 2016

Taught by

Thomas Cheng, Associate Professor (The University of Hong Kong)
David Stallibrass (Fingleton Associates)

Accreditation: 6 CPD hours

About the course:
This six-hour short course gave students an introduction to the Chinese Anti-monopoly Law.

The course covered all the basic aspects of substantive competition law, including restrictive agreements, abuse of dominance, merger review, IP-competition interface, and an area of competition law unique to China known as abuse of administrative monopoly.

Students were introduced to the leading cases with reference to both private litigation in the courts and administrative enforcement by state agencies.

The course sought to highlight the similarities and difference between the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law and competition law in other jurisdictions, such as the EU and the US. In addition, it set the Chinese law within the broader context of Chinese political and economic development.

Global Food Supply Chains and Competition Law

Second BRICS Competition Law Forum on Global Food Supply Chains and Competition Law
Co-organizers: HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development & UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society
18 to 20 May 2016, St Petersburg

About the conference:
The idea of the conference was to engage closely with competition authorities from the BRICS countries but also beyond and to involve international academics from law and economics/sociology of markets in order to test our ideas and proceed to the publication of an edited volume on “Global Food Value Chains and Competition Law” to be submitted to an International Publishing House.

The conference formed part of a new BRICS initiative, the BRICS Joint Research Platform on Competition Law and Policy, which was officially launched during the conference in St Petersburg by the heads of the BRICS Competition Authorities.

It also built on the CLES@UCL research initiative on Global Food Value Chains and Competition Law: Towards “holistic” competition law?

The object of our study: Global Food Supply Chains
The food supply chain is generally depicted as composed by three main levels: agricultural production, industrial processing and wholesale or retail distribution. At a closer look, however, the food supply chain becomes more complex, involving a number of other stages and links that add value to the chain either in the form of goods or services inputs. The food industry is heavily dependent on the scarce resources like arable land, water and genetic resources (a limited biodiversity). At each level of the supply chain, firms as well as other organizational forms perform specific activities supplying goods or services. Moreover, at the same level there may be one or more firms performing the same or complementary activities, adding specific value at their stage of activity. The food supply chain, as a whole, originates therefore even before the agricultural sector, with the factor market (for example the seed provider) and ends with the final consumer. The power relations in the global food value chain are characterized by international actors and local producers operating within the geographic area determined by the logistics of the product. Issues of distribution of the total surplus value of the global food chain are thus paramount and should inevitably influence competition law enforcement.
Our research focuses on global value chains, because of our emphasis on issues of distribution of the total surplus value of the chain and inequality of bargaining power in the context of these transnational supply chains, which, according to us, competition law should tackle. Hence, the use of the terminology of global value chains carries, for us, normative implications. Yet, we wanted this workshop to offer us the possibility to also engage with more mainstream competition law work focusing on global supply chains as a fact with which competition law should grapple with.

The Fall and Rise of the Antitrust Class Action

6 May 2016

Speaker: Professor Spencer Weber Waller (Loyola University of Chicago)
Chair: Professor Ioannis Lianos (UCL Laws)

About the talk:
Antitrust class actions have narrowed significantly in the United States in recent years but still remain robust compared to aggregate litigation in the rest of the world. While the Supreme Court continues to narrow the doorway to class actions, the rest of the world is increasingly interested in creating new mechanisms for aggregate litigation to better support effective private damage litigation in competition cases, and in particular the large number of small claims cases that led to the class action boom in the United States in the first place. The challenge for the rest of the world will be to fashion new remedies consistent with the history, culture, substantive law, and procedural rules of their legal traditions rather than either adopt or reject the system that has evolved in the United States.

The lecture provided an overview of the increasingly stringent requirements for antitrust class actions in the United States and a representative survey of the nascent movement toward collective actions abroad where competition cases have been at the forefront of the debate. The lecture covered the standards for class certification under Rule 23 and recent Supreme Court cases tightening those standards. It then analysed a separate line of Supreme Court cases which effectively eliminates class actions altogether when parties have entered into a contract requiring arbitration rather than litigation and further requires individual rather than collective arbitration proceedings.

We continued with a survey of recent developments in the opposite direction outside the United States. This section examined ongoing changes in the EU, UK, other EU Member States, Mexico, and Canada to empower consumers and business with small claims in competition cases by creating collection action mechanisms of different types. We also briefly discussed the decision of the EU to simply prohibit the type of forced arbitration clauses that the U.S. Supreme actively encourages. We analysed the critical aspect of whether foreign class actions will thrive or whither on the vine – the need for an opt-out mechanism rather than the opt-in mechanism favoured in most jurisdictions outside the U.S. It is ironic that the rest of the world is struggling to figure out how best to empower plaintiffs to bring appropriate class action type proceedings while the U.S. Supreme Court remains principally concerned with how to restrain or eliminate the very same type of action.

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